Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot and Christ Church, Bulkington
Readings – Acts 2. 1-21; John 14. 8-17
“how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia…”
Giotto, Pentecost (1290-9). In the Basilica of St Francis, Assisi, Italy.
Hearing today’s reading about the Parthians, Medes, and Elamites reminded me of a Pentecost a few years ago in a Church in Belfast. I heard this passage read with a strong and distinctive accent—not mine, but an accent that as distinctive in Belfast as it would be in Wiltshire. It turned out this accent came from the land of the Parthians, Medes, and Elamites—some of whom heard the apostles preach in their own languages at the first Pentecost. The lands that were once Parthia, Media, and Elam have been part of Iran for over a millennium, and the lesson was read by a member of what is by now a large Iranian community in Belfast, many of them converts to Christianity.
When the Iranian revolution took place in 1979, there were only around 170,000 Christians in the country, mostly from the ancient Assyrian and Armenian communities. While they were given a protected minority status by Ayatollah Khomeini’s government – as long as they kept their heads down – severe repression was unleashed against the small number of converts from Muslim backgrounds and the churches they belonged to. The Anglican priest in the city of Shiraz, Arastoo Sayyah, was murdered at his desk within eight days of the Revolution. The repression has come in waves since. Right now, a mother of two young children and convert to Christianity named Aida Najaflou has been locked up in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison for four months facing trumped-up charges of “acting against national security”.
We would expect a Church facing such persecution to be in terminal decline. Yet, while tens of thousands of Christians have fled Iran into exile, whether as refugees or after securing work in other countries, the Church in Iran is numerically stronger than it has been for many centuries.
If you told the average person in the UK that hundreds of thousands of people in Iran had converted from Islam to Christianity, they’d probably refuse to believe you. But God continually upends our expectations of what is possible.
Nobody is quite sure how many people have come to faith in Christ in Iran from Muslim backgrounds over the last thirty years or so. Some sceptics claim no more than a few tens of thousands, while some enthusiastic evangelicals claim numbers in the millions. Article 18, a UK-based charity which advocates for religious freedom for people of all faiths, says a “conservative” estimate is that there are between half a million and 800,000 converts to Christianity in Iran. Research carried out anonymously on the Internet in 2020 by sociologists in the Netherlands from a non-religious perspective estimated that 1.5% of Iranians considered themselves Christians, implying just over a million converts from Muslim backgrounds.
We know that Iranians have been popping up in significant numbers in churches in this country, and across Western Europe, since around the mid-2000s. Some seek baptism here, and while this undoubtedly helps any claim for asylum, some go on to become very serious Christians. Others turn up in the UK already mature Christians who attempted to remain in Iran but whose lives were at some point made unliveable—like my friend in Belfast, who had been an active member of an underground house church but fled in 2017 having been tipped off that police were about to arrest him.
As the authorities in Iran continue to persecute Christians, we can only conclude they are worried about the spread of the Church.
The story of Christianity in Iran also ties in with today’s Church of England. The Bishop of Chelmsford, Guli Francis-Deqhani, is an Iranian and she too was exiled from her homeland, arriving in this country aged thirteen. Her father, Hassan Dehqani-Tafti, was raised in a poor Muslim family and converted to Christianity while aged 18 in 1938. Although there had always been ethnic Armenian and Assyrian bishops in Iran, there had been no ethnic Persian bishop in any church since the Muslim conquest in the 7th century. Hassan would become the first when he was consecrated as Anglican Bishop of Iran in 1960, and for many years there were few problems. Then after the Revolution, which he had initially welcomed as a relief from the repression of the Shah and his secret police, there were serious attempts to murder him. Although he and the rest of the family had to flee, his eldest son, Bahram, continued working as a translator and university teacher in Iran. Forty-five years ago Bahram was murdered in cold blood as he drove home from work.
The world is sometimes a dark place. One of the reasons why I struggle with the idea of a purely worldly Christianity is because not everyone in the world sees justice in this life, nor can any social or political system provide perfect justice. There seems to be a need for ultimate divine justice to balance so many human injustices. There will always be people whose lives are formed on the cruellest injustices, like Bahram Dehqani-Tafti. Switch on the news and you’ll see their ranks being added to every day in Ukraine and Gaza and other places we don’t pay much attention to.
There are many reasons why the world, and the way humans run it, can never be made perfect: one is that none of us can seem to cope with too much truth. This isn’t always sinister. The realities of life are often too complex and too fast-paced for us to be able to work everything out from first principles. We all need myths, short-cuts that help us make sense of this fast-paced complexity. But when reality disturbs our myths, our first instinct is too often to protect the myths and suppress the truth. Today’s Gospel reading touches on this. Jesus tells the apostles, that He will send them “the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him”. Or as a movie I love put it, “Truth is like poetry, and most people hate poetry.” To receive the Spirit, perhaps the first step we need to take is to humbly admit how little we know and how much we need to be led by God.
I appreciate there are Christians who believe Jesus was the Son of God, and believe His ethical teachings are a unique foundation for a truly good life, but they struggle with anything not explicable in purely material terms. I believe they are also addressed by Christ in this morning’s Gospel reading— “Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; but if you do not, then believe me because of the works themselves.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is another high-profile convert to Christianity from a Muslim background. For many decades she was an atheist, and an outspoken one. Her journey to Christianity started not because she was suddenly convinced of God whose existence she had definitively rejected, but because of the impact she saw Christianity having on the societies that were formed by it.
Many will come seeking Christ because of the works they see, very uncertain about the reality of a God our culture tells them to reject as being silly and backwards. We should welcome them—to be part of us. It is not us, but the Holy Spirit, who will lead them to God.
For the Holy Spirit hasn’t finished the work begun on that first Pentecost when the Church comprised no more than a few dozen people. Now it embraces billions on every continent and unites Christians alive today with those who have passed to glory across eighty generations.
We may yet see the Holy Spirit work even greater miracles among the descendants of the Parthians, Medes, and Elamites than we’ve seen over the last forty-five years. Or perhaps even among the English, or the Irish.
And now praise, glory, and honour be to the God who is love and the God who is fire, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
